Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: Skele-Teen

You die smiling because you know no matter what comes next, it can’t be any worse than what you’ve already endured: fifteen or sixteen years of beatings and insults and abuse and poverty and suffering.

And after all that, return! Claw your way out of your grave, and fight hard, fight with the strength you wish you had shown when you were alive so nobody else has to go through the hell you did.

You may be dead, but your anger will never die. Neither will your mission. You protect the walking dead- not zombies or anything Hollywood like that. The walking dead you protect are those still breathing kids who are dead inside, their souls already murdered by bad parents and worse schools, by bullies or racists or gay-bashers. If you can keep just one of these kids from putting a 12 gauge in his mouth or walking into his high school cafeteria with a stolen SMG, you’ve won. If you can kill the evil that torments and tortures and ultimate uses up these defenseless kids, there’s a purpose to your undead existence. If you can give hope to the desperate, you’ve done the job you were called to do.

When you succeed, there’s a purpose to everything- to the pain of your own death, to horror of waking up in your grave knowing you’d become something other than human, of the disgusting thrill of feeding. When you succeed, you can almost convince yourself (at least for a few minutes) of the existence of a loving God, watching over even undead monsters like yourself.

And when you fail, when you arrive in town too late, when the kid you’re trying to save dies anyway and takes his druggie scum parents with him, you realize the truth. You’re a monster. Nothing more, nothing less. You’re a George Romero zombie risen from the grave, futily trying to carve some existential bull$%@* meaning out of eating brains. In these moments, you wish you could die again, and get it right this time.

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